Should the Government Have Regulated the Early Internet - or Our Future AI?

In February tech journalist Nicholas Carr published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

A University of Virginia academic journal says the book 'appraises the past and present' of information technology while issuing 'a warning about its future.' And specifically Carr argues that the government ignored historic precedents by not regulating the early internet sometime in the 1990s.

But as he goes on to remind us, the early 1990s were also when the triumphalism of America's Cold War victory, combined with the utopianism of Silicon Valley, convinced a generation of decision-makers that 'an unfettered market seemed the best guarantor of growth and prosperity' and 'defending the public interest now meant little more than expanding consumer choice.' So rather than try to anticipate the dangers and excesses of commercialized digital media, Congress gave it free rein in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, as Carr explains,

'...erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communications that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail.'

As for the social-media platforms, Section 230 of the Act shields them from liability for all but the most egregiously illegal content posted by users, while explicitly encouraging them to censor any user-generated content they deem offensive, 'whether or not such material is constitutionally protected' (emphasis added). Needless to say, this bizarre abdication of responsibility has led to countless problems, including what one observer calls a 'sociopathic rendition of human sociability.' For Carr, this is old news, but he warns us once again that the compulsion 'to inscribe ourselves moment by moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image...[fosters] a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we're also at a further remove from those we interact with.'
Carr's book suggests 'frictional design' to slow posting (and reposting) on social media might 'encourage civil behavior' — but then decides it's too little, too late, because our current frictionless efficiency 'has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind.'

Based on all of this, the article's author looks ahead to the next revolution — AI — and concludes 'I do not think it wise to wait until these kindly bots are in place before deciding how effective they are. Better to roll them off the nearest cliff today...'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.